The Freelance Solidarity Project Discord is a place to share resources and information, huddle with working groups, plan and post events, and shoot the shit. It shares the same foundational purpose as our union—to help set and raise standards across our industry by building community and power among freelance media workers. Here are some rules of the road to help keep this space open and welcoming to all members: 

  1. We build power by building trust between members. We will not engage in or tolerate harassment or discrimination on the basis of sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, physical appearance, age, disability, race, color, national origin, religion, class, or anything else. 
  2. These chats, like all of our member meetings, are off the record. That said, use your discretion when posting—if the information feels too sensitive for Discord, it probably is! 
  3. Lead with kindness and good faith when talking to other members—even in moments of disagreement. 
  4. There are moderators in place to help troubleshoot and offer administrative support, but keeping this Discord inclusive and humming is work that falls to the full membership. We can do that by upholding our community guidelines together. Harassing, misleading, or otherwise unwelcome posts can also be flagged for moderators, who can remove posts that do not respect community guidelines. (Want to be a moderator? Sign up for a shift by messaging Katie or Emma, the Communications Co-chairs) 

Never used Discord before? Check out their Getting Started Guide, and don’t hesitate to ask moderators questions!

Step 1: Registering your account

To register your account, go to discord.gg in any internet browser and click on the sign up / register button. You’ll be asked to fill in a username, password and email.

If you enter “Olive” as your username, Discord will automatically turn it into something like “Olive#1234”. The four digit numbers are random, to distinguish you from everyone else named “Olive” on Discord.

Step 2: Joining the FSP Server

After registering your account, you can now join the FSP server. The server is a private collection of chat rooms only seen by the server’s membership. Our server has channels for each working group, specific discussion channels and server suggestions. We should strive to stay on-topic in each specific channel. For example, if you just want to chat with the membership, you should jump into the general chat, but if you want to request a new channel or suggest a change, you should jump into the server suggestions chat. Switching between channels is as easy as clicking on them in the sidebar. 

Step 3: Assigning roles

Discord has something called “roles,” which will be very helpful for our server. We have roles for the different working groups you’re in, your pronouns, if you’re in the organizing committee, and if you’re a moderator or not. Some of these roles, like the moderator role, give you special permissions on Discord. The pronoun roles, on the other hand, only exist as a quick reminder to others which pronouns we all use. You can click on anyone’s profile picture, and their list of roles will be visible to you.